Ellwood gets ready for doubles

With all the recent focus being on Reed Kegel and WPIAL singles, the Ellwood City tennis team is ready to look forward to the section doubles tournament on Thursday at Pearson Park.

The only problem is, they don’t have time.

“Unfortunately what will hurt us the most is lack of time to practice. With rain delays and make ups, and tournaments,” said head coach Kim Conti.

“That takes away from any opportunity that I can get them out there to practice.”

Practice is crucial, because the two doubles pairs don’t normally play together. Ellwood is taking its top four seeded players and pairing them.

No. 1 singles Kegel will play with No. 2 singles Lauren Stiles, and No. 3 singles player Randi Sharketti will play with the only doubles player going to section doubles, No. 1 doubles player Molly Dean.

Conti believes that the team will still be competitive since Kegel and Sharketti were a team last year, and made it into the WPIAL double tournament.

“They competed well, so that leads me to believe that this year taking our top four, we should be competitive to a certain level,” Conti said.

Sharketti and Dean aren’t too worried either. They said they aren’t expecting either extreme to happen, just that they’ll fair somewhere in the middle and have good teamwork.

“Because we are friends, we won’t be afraid to tell each other what we’re doing wrong and help each other out,” Sharketti said.

“And we won’t get mad, we’ll just go try and fix it.”

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